At the invitation of the MAC Niteroi and curators Pablo Leon de la Barra and Raphael Fonseca, the Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero envisioned an exhibition that is about the relationship of site specificity and ephemerality, blurring the line where the exhibition begins and where it ends, not only in the sense of space or field but also in its relation with time.
Herrero sees his paintings, which range from small canvases to monumental urban spaces, as open-ended landscapes that are never finished, always growing and morphing into something new. In a sense, these works grow beyond the canvas or vertical wall and make their way to the horizontal surfaces of the floor and ceiling, extending his abstract color fields into urban spaces and public life. Color is approached by the artist as sound and volume. To create this work, as with his other compositions, Herrero considers the weight of color,...as well as the different kinds of energy color can absorb or may come to express.
At the iconic architectural project by Oscar Niemeyer in Niterói, Herrero’s work grows out of the murals in the central room: sometimes these murals are dense and sometimes they break into pieces that float throughout the surfaces of the walls and the connections between them. They are both dependent and interdependent, like fragments of a larger whole; the meaning is open and linked by formal and narrative poetics that spread like fields beyond the museum and into the landscape and vice versa. These instant forms depend on the interaction with space and their surroundings. “The exhibition at MAC Niteroi resides in the painting and in the temporal relations that occur between the building and the landscape where its located, an exercise to move from the site specific to the time specific aspect of the painting”, explains Herrero.
For the artist, some of the properties of paint, like color, hue, brilliance, lightness, transparency, fluidity and the physical phenomena that stands from them into the space are like people and societies. In Herrero’s words, “like colors, we are constantly affected by our surrounding, whatever is next to us in space can trigger huge differences in our personalities. Painted in straight off, in dense pure colors, the pictures conjure up mental landscapes, landscapes that relate to the architecture as much as to the place where the building is, in the city of Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro, embraced by mountains named Pan de Azucar, forms that come out of the horizon line abruptly but with grace and beauty. Moving through the museum the building guides you in a choreography that allows you to enjoy some of the highlights of the landscape that includes the Cristo Redentor and the Pão de Açucar through the amazing bay”.
RELATED WORKS
Alphabet (2018)
In response to a site-specific commission for the MCA atrium, Federico Herrero paints the museum’s second-floor entrance with his characteristic color blocks to create a large, abstract landscape. Jumping from the atrium wall to the facade windows, the mural offers an immersive experience that—similar to a real landscape—dramatically changes with the shifting seasons.
Open Envelope (2018)
A site-specific work commissioned for the Witte de With’s ground floor gallery space, Open Envelope is a room-size painting. Herrero began painting this work in the folds of the architecture—in the gallery corners, on the perimeters of its windows, at the meeting points between walls and floor. But his irregular block-like shapes and elongated color- fields slowly trickled elsewhere. Through the sprawling shapes of Open Envelope, the work painterly envelops the gallery.
Catarata (2014)
The exhibition Panorama 33 at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, curated by Lisette Lagnado, included a site specific painting at a building in downtown São Paulo.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Federico Herrero was born in 1978 in San José, Costa Rica, where he still lives and works. He studied painting at the Pratt Institute, New York, from 1997 to 1998. In 2001 he won the special prize for a young artist at the 49th Venice Biennale. Herrero also participated in the exhibition Fare Mundi/Nuevos Mundos at the Latin American Pavilion part of the 53rd Venice Biennial in 2009.
Herrero’s artistic practice encompasses painting on canvas, public wall painting as well as sculptural installations. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Museum of Contemporary art Chicago, Witte de With in Rotterdam, Museum of contemporary art Detroit; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica; Kunstverein Freiburg; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; and Para/site, Hong Kong. In 2014 he participated in the exhibition Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which toured to the South London Gallery, London, in 2016.
Imágenes de la Exposición
Federico Herrero — Cortesía de la Galeria Luisa Strina
Entrada actualizada el el 02 sep de 2019
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